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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Two Lines

Written by

Year

2014

A line of poetry on a page exists in space, but I think of it as a kind of timing, a measured flow of poetic energy, a dynamic. My sense of a line is given, as my way of walking or my voice is given and bodily. I walk a path from here to the edge of the woods, I read or speak a line, taking time. My line that required the page to go into landscape orientation was written in the wide landscape of New Mexico (subtle colorations of open, parallel ridges receding into distances, sun moving across during a day). As a person looking at the horizon, my sight line is perpendicular to the horizontal line of mountains. This compares to a person looking at a line of writing on a page, and the line length, the horizontal, is generated by your body's sense of extension, or periphery. To register many small colorations or distinctions, I needed a long pliant thread. I was also transforming some philosophical ideas into the lyric, and I needed room. I maintained the line's tension with internal rhymes and internal caesurae.